Three Reasons to Switch to Construction Time and Attendance Software

March 1, 2015

Construction time and attendance software is an important part of a modern technologically equipped construction company. The challenges, costs and frustrations of using traditional paper time cards (or other manual methods such as Excel Sheets, etc.) are not acceptable. It is important to streamline your business. Construction time and attendance software will streamline your business and reduce your costs. Construction time and attendance software will also improve your job costing and improve your billing accuracy.

Why is construction time and attendance software superior to other manual methods?

The American Payroll Association has estimated that businesses that switch to an electronic time and attendance method save from 2-8% on average. Why do they save so much after switching to time and attendance software? Manual methods such as paper time cards inflate time reported from the field. Often these time cards are filled out at the end of the day. In the worst case, time cards are filled out at the end of the week. Ouch! When paper time cards are filled out at the end of the day or week, there is little chance of them being accurate. In fact, employees round up when they use their memory to fill out paper time sheets. Capturing time activities using time and attendance software provides an accurate (to the minute) record of what times were actually worked. This real-time capturing removes the estimation and rounding up from the process. Construction time and attendance software will also reduce the administrative time spent on your payroll process. In general companies switching to time and attendance software from a manual method reduce time spent on doing payroll by about 50%. Why? Paper time cards are very burdensome to process and track down. They are often sloppy and administrative personnel have a difficult time reading them. Phone calls to the field staff are often required when time cards are not turned in, or are turned in incomplete.

Construction time and attendance software will improve your job costing. How? Similar to how hours are generally overpaid due to over-reported hours, job costing is far from accurate when using a manual time tracking method. When workers are asked to record job name and task information associated with their time activities, it is generally a sloppy process when done on paper. Using time and attendance software captures the activities in real-time. As each job and task combination is undertaken, a new time record is created in the software, in real-time. This real-time capture of job costing information is obviously superior to manual methods, especially considering the manual methods are most often “guesstimated” using memory at the end of a day or week.

Construction time and attendance software will also improve your billing. Having an accurate electronic time record to bill your clients from will generally make lots of positive improvements in your billing. These improvements include additional money billed, as well as clean invoices with the time record as backup. Now your customers won’t be able to argue so easily with the time they are billed for. Presenting them with a clean and accurate electronic record is generally adequate proof to prove your invoice is accurate.

Construction time and attendance software will help you improve your construction business. It will help you reduce costs and increase billing. If you haven’t gotten on board with time and attendance software yet, you may want to consider replacing those paper time cards soon.

Author: ClockShark | Mobile Time Tracking and Scheduling

ClockShark is the #1 time tracking and scheduling app for construction and field service companies.